Week 5 – Recovering a Sense of Possibility

There’s really a lot of information tucked into this chapter this week. How very telling that Julia starts off the chapter saying our chief barrier to accepting God’s generosity is our limited notion of what we are in fact able to accomplish. I feel I am a pretty good Christian (I’m sure every Christian in the world does so isn’t that a matter of interpretation? ) but I needed the reminder of exactly how powerful God is and how I need to stop unconsciously setting limiits on how much God can give me or help me. I needed the reminder that creativity is a spiritual issue. Any progess is made by leaps of faith, some small and some large. I needed the reminder that God is unlimited to supply and everyone has equal access and I’m not depriving anyone else with my abundance.

I’ve really been fighting the process this time. I’m not sure why. Last time I had no problem reading the chapter and no problem writing my morning pages but had a problem with making myself do artist dates. This time I’m really struggling to get the chapters read. I’ve been running behind and reading the chapter at the end of the week instead of the beginning. I know, bad teacher! LOL! But I refuse to beat myself up over it. It seems like as soon as I sit down to read there are a dozen different things that need my attention. The dogs need to go out, one of the kids call, a customer needs advice on an order, the toilet is running, etc. It’s always something! So I’m running behind in my reading. Then I’m not doing real great with my morning pages either. I feel like I have so much to do that I stay up to late trying to get things done and then hit the ground running in the morning and have just not made morning pages the priority I need to make them. I vow to do better on this. I’m not having any trouble at all with my Artist Dates this time though. When it’s time to do the reading or the morning pages my creative child says, “Do we hafta???” But when it’s time to go do an Artist Date, my creative child says, “Yay!!! Let’s go have fun!” LOL! Last time I had trouble with the exercises in the chapter and the tasks at the end of the chapters. This time I’m not having any issues with those. Interesting how my rebelling is taking such a different form this time than it did last time.

I had a real spell with anger this week. Remember back in week 3 when I said there hadn’t been any unaccustomed bursts of energy and sharp peaks of anger, joy, and grief. I didn’t have any anger to use as a fuel. Woah boy, I made up for that this week. The last couple days I have just been angry at the world! Wanting to lash out. Wanting to HURT someone. Of course I never would but I was just downright PISSED! I’m not sure why. It really came out of nowhere. But I wrote in my morning pages I felt like I was going to explode and acid was going to rain down on everyone within a 10 miles radius! As I read this chapter (that I should’ve read at the beginning of the week) I saw that I was caught in what Julia called the Virtue Trap. I have not been giving myself downtime. Without it, the artist in us feels vexed, angry, out of sorts. Yeah, I’d say that fit! I needed the healing of time alone. Without pressure that I needed to be doing something else! Haven’t gotten that yet, but I got enough things done that I felt I could push off the pressure cooker long enough to take some much needed time for myself. Julia really got me this week when she said, We want to be generous, of service, of the world. But what we really want is to be left alone. Oh yes! Please just leave me alone for a little while! I did have quite a bit of synchronicity this week too which was quite interesting. It’s kind of complicated so it deserves it’s own post. 🙂

One thing in this chapter I haven’t tried yet that I intend to try this coming week is to experiment with the two-step process of asking for answers in the evening and listeing for answers in the morning when I do my morning pages. Being open to all help. I’m going to use that as an incentive to get myself to actually do my morning pages every morning this coming week. All in all, I think I am moving right along in this process. How are YOU doing?

Responses

“We want to be generous, of service, of the world. But what we really want is to be left alone.” Oh my goodness does this describe last month. And this week I was full of venom primarily because I felt my every moment was being planned for me! This week will be more of the same but I did start of with some me time. Thanks for putting into words what I had not been able to express.

Thanks for coming to visit MoB. Glad to have you here! Yes, this is an interesting study and I hope you will come back and visit as we move forward. I know you will identify with a lot of it. As creatives we can’t help but identify with Julia Cameron. 🙂